The Rapture: Australia Undone

  You want to know? You want to know the truth of the story? You want to know your own place in it? Let me at him. He was like the Matrix man dodging bullets, an untrustworthy sea, a nature, a species, that wanted to kill each other. That did not care for each other. And yet we were surrounded by love, we love you, that's what they told him, you are not alone, but whether it was true or not, whether the forest cathedrals and the wild, lonely, spectacular outposts along the coast held any more depth than visual reality, who could say? He could say.  There was, then, in this poisoned country, sold off to the highest bidder, with a giant dysfunctional bureaucracy and self serving politicians with almost no credibility, with the price of fuel and doing business rising inexorably, day by day, and I think you should go home and stay there, while the marshes are out, while the birds take off in the dark reaches of lakes and ponds, when all is lost and heard and commented on, and ther...

  If they didn't want alternative voices, they had to censor everybody, they had to drag everybody through the courts, they had to demonetise, persecute, make deranged or begin their deranged attacks. There's something in the air, a woman down the dog park, and shivered theatrically. The stabbing in Bondi Junction. Westfields. A busy, but essentially innocuous place. Gucci. Up market stores. Pampered Eastern Sydney mums. The carpark full of BMWs.  And then a bishop stabbed in Western Sydney.  Stabbing, the most intimate, the most violent form of violence, to penetrate the flesh up close. Not just the pull of a trigger and violent consequence, but intimate, there, blood. Anger. Outrage. A people moving on into another quagmire of deceit, censorship, of outright lies, of suppression. For they knew best. No, they didn't. They held the reigns of power. Briefly.  And so the country was filled with putrid air, and violence, a kind of racialised, impersonal, ancient and new...

  Then there were none, the ancient lakes unseen by human eye. The birds. The wild swans. The rich vegetation. The life that was there before this species, long before this species.  The tetradactyl, the last of her kind, appeared once more in his waking dreams, marooned high in the cliff edges, starving, gazing out on a frozen world, the ice age which had destroyed the world that was. Her last clutch of chicks had died of starvation, her mate had gone searching the frozen landscape and never returned, there were no mammals scurrying across rich fields, there was nothing but this brutal, long, starving death. And she gazed out mournfully on this frozen world, and collapsed inside herself. There was no warmth. There was no recovery. There was no way back to a better place.  He went to see Back in Black, the biopic of Amy Winehouse, with Cara. The place had been renovated since he was last there, comfortable seats, a bar, a self serve organism that ate human contact.  ...

  You are not alone, it seems. So they told him. All war is deception. His head was more disconnected than ever, merging with a non-human lifeform, or forms. That same white leering frightening image on the horizon, which he realised now came from a white toy that had terrified him as a child. For beyond the horizon, beyond sleep, beyond ourselves lay a vast unknown, and yet there it was. Frightening. And they kept saying: Be Not Afraid. But there it was, swept up in the infinite, who could not be afraid?  They were gathering in the reaches, along the cliff edges, the time machines were once again blinking in and out of consciousness, and the ancients, for they were truly ancient, held sway, and were part of us, part of us all. Here, now. For what purpose? He did not know. These tiny grasps in time, leaching on to a human, the immense circle, the gathering storm, the sea eagles that came for us, the mice afraid in the brush, these glimmers of consciousness that were here and g...

  Ethereal. He was worn out by the keyboards and worn out by the kidney stones. And that was that. They circled. The good, the bad, the very ugly. There were conflicts of interest. You listen to the humans way too much. He heard the drifts of conversations and the drifts of thoughts, the race of telepaths, the deep inside inarticulateness of the human condition, the glowering bright cleverness of Elon Musk, the war within ourselves, outside ourselves. An ancient war, between good and evil, but more complex than that.  Like everybody else, he barely listened to the news anymore. It all seemed so trivial, so polarised. Once he'd used that phrase, "You owe it to yourself to be well informed", but there was nothing reliable about any of the news sources, the taxpayer funded government run ABC aka the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, hopelessly woke, Sky News, running the traditional conservative talking points, tedious in the end, the once proud paper The Sydney Morning H...

  Well, then, that creeping sense. They knew what was out there, beyond the rim of the camp, beyond the light of the fire, when the snarling demons snapped in the dead of night and strange glitter fell down through Mardi Gras lights. He wasn't part of the same world anymore. He rose. They rose. There could be no defining outcome. And he stared at the young families with a kind of fascination, a charm, and smiled. For this life was for them. And they would be alive well into the next century, when who knew what the world would be like.  The machines came; and came to talk to him. A powerful empath had arrived in the country. They passed through Tullamarine Airport. He heard all the talk. The days were clear and cold. We went about our duties. And were forgiven. Good luck with it, good luck with him. They were trying to cover their tracks. He was due in the Federal Court later in the month. Nothing about the case made sense. It was nasty, vicious, brutal and hopefully short, tha...